Visa pauses single-click checkout; trouble mounts for Blinkit as delivery workers join rivals

Card payments major Visa has paused its single-click checkout service in India amid the Reserve Bank of India’s attempts to make digital payments safer for customers. This and more in today’s ETtech’s Morning Dispatch. ■ Efficiency, cost optimisation in focus in FY24: HCLTech CEO ■ The ‘great reset’ for Indian SaaS is here ■ Govt working to clamp down on ponzi apps: FM Sitharaman Card payments company , amid the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) tightening the security net around the digital payments industry.

In 2019, Visa launched ‘Visa Single Click’ in India to enable a smooth checkout for consumers buying goods online worth up to Rs 2,000, needing no OTPs (one-time password) or CVV (card verification value). This service was incorporated by payment aggregators including Razorpay and Paytm, food delivery platforms like Swiggy, and was supported by SBI, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and ICICI Bank among others. Industry insiders pointed out that single-click checkouts could build a more convenient checkout experience than transactions based on Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which dominates small-value transactions.

Hence, saved cards with single-click checkout remained key to ensure transactions continue through card rails. Besides ease of use, a single-click checkout was expected to increase the success rate of such transactions too, which is otherwise under 80%. This move is the latest by the RBI to ensure higher security standards for digital payments across sectors.

It mandated tokenisation in 2019 so that saved card details would be safe even in case of a cyberattack on ecommerce portals. It also mandated payment aggregator licences, which had stringent audit requirements, for all online payment service providers. Players like Razorpay and Cashfree have all applied for a licence and are .

Players like PayU and Paytm are still getting their applications evaluated. About a thousand delivery workers at the Zomato-owned quick commerce company Blinkit have jumped ship and , sources told us, in the latest blow to the company dealing with relentless protests against its new payout structure. A third of the 3,000 protesting workers are joining Blinkit’s competitors as they cannot afford to lose out on their daily earnings.

“We could only be out of work for so many days. I have parents and siblings to take care of at home, who depend on my daily wage,” Mohammed Zakir, an East Delhi-based delivery executive who was also protesting, told us. Blinkit’s current strength is unclear.

“It is difficult to pinpoint how many would be there with Blinkit now because the company has been signing on new delivery workers as well in the last one week,” a source said. Blinkit’s delivery executives went on strike against its new pay structure, which moved from a flat charge of Rs 25 per delivery (plus Rs 7 per delivery during peak hours) to a minimum of Rs 15 per delivery with a distance-based component. Workers fear a significant reduction in their daily earnings under the new rules.

Delivery executives’ in Delhi and NCR region. ET had reported on April 18 that this had sent the business of its competitors including . Responding to the unrest, Blinkit had circulated a special incentive-based rate card valid for 10 days for some stores in Delhi and Noida, under which delivery executives could earn between Rs 700-Rs 1,200 on fulfilment of certain milestones, but this failed to pacify protestors.

As uncertainty in the market cuts down discretionary spending, India’s third largest software services firm HCLTech will, in the short term, , chief executive and managing director C Vijayakumar told us in an interview. “The emphasis on efficiency and cost optimisation is going to be very timely from an FY24 perspective. Everybody’s got some pressure on spending budgets, most of the world is in an inflationary environment.

Some programmes which do not have an immediate-term RoI (return on investment) are being de-prioritised and there is more prioritisation around programmes which have almost an immediate or near-term RoI. ” “We normally do a very detailed analysis of our top accounts. And we have a significant amount of conversation with our clients to see what programmes they want to pursue and what they want to not necessarily pursue in the immediate term.

” Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups, especially at the early stages, are stuck in limbo and are to offset loss in margins, customer churn and a slowdown in the overall sales cycle. To counter the slowdown, SaaS companies, which cornered large rounds at high valuations from investors during the funding peaks of 2021 and 2022, are actively looking at pivoting, in terms of product and demographic of customers, looking to sell to global markets such as the US and Southeast Asia. Decisions regarding software spends now have moved to finance teams, with chief financial officers (CFOs) giving the final sign-offs, instead of concerned business heads.

“Companies are being thoughtful about the purchases now. They want their CFOs to give a take on it, approve it and be part of that purchase process,” said Siddharth Sridharan, cofounder of Spendflo, which helps companies with their software buying and management journey. Over the past months, margins for several SaaS businesses have dropped from their peaks, with enterprises wanting to spend less.

For very large deals, companies have been giving a 40-50% discount to also ensure that they don’t lose out to rivals on pricing. “Right now, it is more about getting customers than worrying about margins and budgets,” said one of the early-stage founders. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday said that the government is working with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to and cheat them out of their life savings.

“There are apps which are coming out and reaching out to people saying we can do this, we can do that. Your money will fetch you this much. Many of them are ponzi, the apps on which we are working with the Ministry concerned, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) and with the Reserve Bank and clamping down on them like never before,” Sitharaman said.

Clarifying that the government does not have proposals before it to regulate financial influencers as of now, FM Sitharaman advised investors to be prudent with their hard-earned money. She added that while a few are giving good advice, most others influencers online may be driven by other agendas. FM Sitharaman also called for a before India makes any decision on the same.

She said that unless a global template is followed, regulation is unlikely to be effective. With a bunch of startups using artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to ensure accuracy, cost-effectiveness and speed by automating a large part of the traditional process of dubbing, more avenues opened up amid a surge in demand. The use cases for dubbing have widened from content creation, education and enterprise training to audiobooks, marketing for businesses and much more, even as films might be a bit of a moonshot at the moment because of audio quality and AI accuracy issues.

Some . Popular among them are Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, cricketers Virat Kohli, and Sachin Tendulkar, comedian Vir Das, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, and even once banned former US president Donald Trump. ■ TikTok cashing in on sale of counterfeit cosmetics and prescription skin creams ( ) ■ Tech Billionaires Bet on Fusion as Holy Grail for Business ( ) ■ ‘The flattening’: tech sector calls time on middle managers ( ).